A number of pressing problems confront the healthcare industry. As of June 2013, there were approximately 118,000 patients registered by United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) as needing an organ transplant. Between January and March 2013, only 6,891 transplants were performed. Each year more patients are added to the UNOS list than transplants are performed, resulting in a net increase in the number of patients waiting for a transplant. For example, as of 2011, over 15,000 people were registered as needing a liver graft/transplant; however only about 5,800 liver transplants were performed that year. In 2010, the median wait time for a liver was over 12 months.
Additionally, the research and development cost of a new pharmaceutical compound is approximately $1.8 billion. See Paul, et al. (2010). How to improve R&D productivity: the pharmaceutical industry's grand challenge. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 9(3):203-214. Drug discovery is the process by which drugs are discovered and/or designed. The process of drug discovery generally involves at least the steps of: identification of candidates, synthesis, characterization, screening, and assays for therapeutic efficacy. Despite advances in technology and understanding of biological systems, drug discovery is still a lengthy, expensive, and inefficient process with low rate of new therapeutic discovery.